After Two Centuries.. Artificial Intelligence Deciphers a Military Message from Napoleon's Era

An AI model has deciphered a military letter from Napoleon Bonaparte's era, which remained incomprehensible for over two centuries. Dated March 1809, the letter was addressed to General Auguste de Marmont and contained information about the positions of French and allied forces. Engineer Carter Church used the GPT-6 Astra model to analyze and decode the document in six hours, relying on a single image and a text command. The decryption helped correct the document's date from 1807 to 1809.

An artificial intelligence model has succeeded in deciphering a military letter from the era of Napoleon Bonaparte, which remained incomprehensible for over two centuries. The letter is dated March 1809 and was addressed to French General Auguste de Marmont, commander of French forces in Dalmatia (present-day Croatia). Napoleon ordered Eugène de Beauharnais, his viceroy in Italy, to send encrypted information to Marmont regarding the positions and numbers of French and allied forces, ahead of the war with Austria. The letter included information about Bavarian, Polish, Saxon, and French forces, along with a Russian move against Austria. Engineer Carter Church from the company SentinelOne used the GPT-6 Astra model to analyze and decode the document, relying on a single image and one text command. The work took about six hours. The decryption helped correct the document's date from 1807 to 1809 and revealed a phrase that completed a truncated sentence in the printed version of Napoleon's order. Five symbols remain undeciphered.